June was the most active month from visitors by a wide margin and it has been ever year that I have had stats for it. No surprise there though, as it is the month of the draft. September was the least active month from visitors this year for the second year in a row.

2013 finished with the second most visits since I began tracking stats for the website in 2008. It fell 17,000 visits short. If only the Reds had made a blockbuster prospect trade this year, we may have made it.

There were 8216 comments posted in 2013 that remain on the site (no spam and no comments that I wound up deleting).

On the flip side, the top referrers to my site were “search engines”, which brought in 49,389 visits (google accounted for 37,458 of those). Twitter came in second at 17,569. Yardbarker came in third, followed by RedlegNation.com and Cincinnati.com (Enquirer).

The most searched term that brought a visitor to the website (the top 6 are actually all some variation of redsminorleagues or redsminorleagues.com) outside of the name or address was Seth Mejias-Brean. Funny enough, the second most popular one was “minor leagues Doug Gray”. Tucker Barnhart was the second most popular player name to come back from the search engines, with Sal Romano, Jeremy Kivel and Ryan LaMarre rounding out the player top 5.

About The Author

Doug Gray is the owner and operator of this website and has been running it since 2004 in one variation or another. You can follow him on twitter @dougdirt24, contact him via email here or follow the site on Facebook. and Youtube.

No changes coming because of any of this, aside from I hope to have more articles this year than last. And maybe learn all of the countries in the world so next year I can’t claim I had never heard of three of them.

Now if only I could get through to youtube, where they are fighting with me over having advertisements in the videos. Incredibly frustrating.

Happy New Year everyone! Doug thanks for all that you do and for a great 2013 – and here is to a great 2014 for you, the site, and the Reds.

Question: Why do you think September is the lowest traffic month? I get that the minor league games are coming to an end, but the Reds have had good enough teams to be relevant in September the last two years. Do you think you should shift the content to more major league oriented stuff at that time? The “All Questions Answered” articles seem to be the biggest draws each week. Perhaps you could shift in that time to two of those a week instead of just one on Wednesday. (Just my opinion and thoughts which probably don’t amount to much when it comes to running a website.)

Well, it is honestly tough to say right now as I am having issues with youtube/google right now. They are making me jump through all kinds of crazy hoops in order to continue paying me for the advertising through the youtube channel so I may be losing that income. While it isn’t much, it certainly does help pay for traveling to some games throughout the year and every little bit helps.

Honestly, I don’t know what the improvements would be to keep everything going. Adding to the subscriber base kind of changes all of that dynamic, but sticking with just that, doubling what I currently have is probably a start to that. Right now, I am under 75 subscribers. Book sales are also way down this year, at least to this point. Advertising is also down, though I have tried to compensate for that by adding a few extra ads and another advertising company that is starting later today to test out their rates versus the current company I use.

So I either need to find a way to improve my content enough to get a lot more people to subscribe, or improve the content enough to get significantly more viewers on the site to boost the number of advertisements that get viewed.

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